Hey, Alisa.

Can you give some more information about what the challenges are? Also, what specifically is it about the app that you’re not super happy with? 

This might help everyone get a better understanding and provide some insight 

Sure thing!

1. Transparency of actions
   Since the app was installed via my API key, it acts in my name. This leads to the aforementioned confusion among agents as to why I keep unassigning tickets they have just assigned to a colleague. This is the same behaviour as the auto-merger app, but because the auto-merger always adds the same generic comment, I was able to build a workflow that now tags all merged tickets so it’s clearer that it wasn’t me who acted on the ticket. I have been unable to come up with a similar workflow for the out of office app as I cannot find a suitable trigger for it
2. Limited setting options (if I am not using the settings correctly, please somebody educate me )
   We currently use the “re-assign” option for tickets, but it would be nice, if instead of only being able to send the ticket back to one group, we could send it to the primary group for the agent. So for instance, we route tickets back to the 1st Line Support Group and they then need to send it back to the agent’s group and assign to another agent. But it would be nice to be able to say “If a ticket is assigned to an agent in group X (and they are on leave), reassign to group X” and likewise to do that for all groups as this would save us one step. We started out with the out of office message but agents didn’t like that because they felt it cluttered their tickets, hence we switched. The Unassign option we have never tried and I don’t think will be suitable for us as we have lots of “marathon” tickets, which take a long time, so unassigning them for the duration of maybe just a few days seems pointless
3. Calendar visibility
   By default, our calendar in the app will always show “Awesome! Nobody is on leave.” Only when you actively select the date again from the date picker, will it show you who is actually on leave. This seems like a small thing but it’s just so annoying and counter-intuitive that you need to specifically need to select a date (even when today is selected by default) to  see that actually, there is a whole bunch of people on leave, the calendar just doesn’t show this by default (the more I think about this, this really feels like a bug...)

I think that about sums it up

Hi @AlisaB I can tell you that the first point you made is an issue across the board with applications. So much so that I we decided to just purchase another agent license and name it Help Desk, and then used the api key of that agent for all workflows. So now all agents know that if anything it done to a ticket and its from agent “Help Desk” it was done via an application that is installed or a workflow that was triggered. We have raised this concern of the additional expense to the support team and just have not be able to convince the freshwork higher ups of this burden.

Definitely feel your pain!

I had a lingering fear in the back of my head that using an additional admin or systems license might currently be the only solution to this

Maybe I could use this as an excuse to rename my account into System/Admin and never have to work on a BAU ticket ever again. Silver linings and all that

But glad to see this does not just bother me and that I am not missing a trick here.

or just use your API Key and look like you are involved in every ticket. Can’t argue that you are not engaged in ticket resolution. HAHAHA!